Before the word gay had really been invented, was there's no such thing. Only a country, basically as mindless about these matters - based upon our peasant superstitions, religious superstitions - would they make categories. Everybody's everything.

I like the distance that Europe gives me. Also if I stayed in America I'd be a full-time politician and have no time for writing, which is why I went to Europe to live in 1961.

God, or what have you, will not be found at the far end of a syllogism, no matter how brilliantly phrased or conceived.

Fifty percent of people won't vote, and fifty percent don't read newspapers. I hope it's the same fifty percent.

Drugs. If they did not exist our governors would have invented them in order to prohibit them and so make much of the population vulnerable to arrest, imprisonment, seizure of property, and so on.

It is ironic that a nation that has never experienced a coup d'etat should be so obsessed with the idea of conspiracy.

I write in the morning at a table, longhand on yellow legal pads, just like Nixon, when I’m doing fiction.